Oblivion. Death. The rites we practise to farewell the dead. What better themes to end 2020? This afternoon I have begun a reading plan for 2020 that incorporates listening to audio books, and in one afternoon I have completed, while talking a lunchtime walk and doing the pre-dinner dishes, the magnificent sentences of Thomas Browne's… Continue reading My last words on 2020 from Thomas Browne’s Urn Burial
I plunged again into my white box of old handwritten index cards today, and pulled from the archive, laid down in my twenties and thirties, a fragment from Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), the Russian literary critic and philosopher. The text comes from a late work of Bakhtin, Speech Genres, although I took the text from Clark… Continue reading Fragments from the Burning Archive: Mikhail Bakhtin
In my study is a box of old index cards with fragmentary thoughts, notes on narratives and characters, and quotations taken from my reading. The box is labelled "Notes to Digitise," and perhaps that will one day be a retirement project. But for now it is a stimulus to dig deep down into the Burning… Continue reading Fragments from the Burning Archive: Anna Akhmatova
The year of fear 2020 has been the year of the Great Fear. This Fear has locked us down in safety. This Fear has opened the gate to soft totalitarianism. This Fear has sabotaged the freedom, responsibility, associations and independent thought of hundreds of millions of citizens. This Fear has shed the aged liberal skin… Continue reading The year of fear: 2020 in review
The freedom of internal exile So much of this year I have struggled with the moral crisis of how to endure and to live well through a corrupt, decaying, failing and abusive regime. I do not mean just the errant minor provincial government that I serve as lowly under-castellan. I mean the wider institutional regime… Continue reading The freedom of internal exile: 2020 in review
My repost today comes from 22 April 2018, and seems relevant to the difficulties we are experiencing in our distressed republics today. I also posted something of a follow-up post on the Collapsing New Buildings of Government. Cultural fragmentation and the collapse of authority in Western democracies During the week I was discussing with a… Continue reading Cultural fragmentation and the collapse of authority in Western democracies
Throughout the year I have kept a diary in a an A5 black notebook of 200 pages or so. I have followed this practice for quite some years now, and when I write the first entry in the notebook will give it a title. This year's notebooks I titled , "The view from Thucydides Tower"… Continue reading Fragments from my diaries – the year in review
As part of my The Kaeleidoscope of 2020: Year in Review post I have updated with my reflections on the pandemic and lockdowns in this section, Viral Meltdown Viral Meltdown How could the year in review not begin with the pandemic and the virus? Since January I have followed the story of the coronavirus and… Continue reading Viral Meltdown – Year in Review
Today I am reposting this piece from July 2019, following the 2019 Australian election. It is newly relevant today as the American republic wrestles with how to save its crumbling political institutions from the oligarchs, their corrupt parasites and mercenaries, and its failing imperial war faction. As Edward Erler asks in The American Mind, Is… Continue reading On human frailty in governing
A tradition that I have embraced on this blog over the last few years has been to write year in review posts in December. In 2019 I reflected on walking through the desert, notes on my reading, the democratic rebuff to progressivism, and walking through the circles of hell. In 2018 I reflected on ambiguous… Continue reading The kaleidoscope of 2020: year in review
Today, I am reposting this response to William Dalrymple's magnificent The Last Mughal: the Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857. I wonder if, over the next 5 to 10 years, we will be conducting sad online mushairas (poetic symposiums) and singing laments for the collapse of the Washington court? Cultural collapse: Delhi 1857 (February 4,… Continue reading Cultural collapse: Delhi 1857
Today I am reposting this post from April 2, 2018 that reflected on some of the literary symbols that formed uncanny fascinators in my mind. *** When I was about fifteen, I found Edmund Wilson's Axel's Castle in a library. It was my introduction to literary modernism, and their progenitors, the French symbolists. Over time… Continue reading Axel’s Castle, a mirror and an encyclopaedia
I am reposting this reflection on the response to political decay in the midst of the constitutional crisis under way in America, which reveals dramatically the rot in America's institutions and elites. Over the next weeks I want to focus on some long-term writing projects outside the blog and so will mostly be reposting some… Continue reading A solution to political decay: the ordinary virtues of governing well
Prophets are despised in their own country, and now and then I am tempted deeply by Cassandra's fate. So in appreciation of true prophets and great writers, who formed my understanding of the world as a young man, here are some brief testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "If one is forever cautious, can one remain a… Continue reading An interlude on Solzhenitsyn
"even well-educated, amiable, open-minded people in the United States do not realize that their country has a Hispanic past as well as a Hispanic future."Felipe Fernandez-Armesto Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States Over the last few weeks I have read Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States. The… Continue reading America’s Hispanic Past and its Hispanic Future Proves it is not Exceptional
Terrible events occur in history that devastate the cities that our minds build. The Barbarians sack Rome, and other-named disasters have similarly brought ruin to all past civilisations across time and the globe. It is hard not to see, from my crumbling Tower of Thucydides, in all the obscure runes of our time, a similar… Continue reading The Coming Renaissance of the Second Culture
And if and when Trump is no longer President, all the ills of political system can no longer be blamed on Trump. For four years now – in America but also through viral spread around the world – all the ills of our deformed, barren political society have been personified in a metonymic myth: Donald… Continue reading Our barren, deformed political society
“There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be thesame here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evilof the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”Aleksander Solzhenitsyn The events of the 2020 USA election confirm Solzhenitsyn's insight. America stands on the brink of collapsing into an oligarchy. The Newspeakers of democracy have… Continue reading The Time of Troubles to come in America
This long post contains my reflections on the election in America. There are six reflections: One. The folly of forecasts: my confession Two. The Presidency is determined not by broadcast anchors, but by Constitutional procedure Three. The pending legitimation crisis. Four. Our deformed, barren political society Five. The post-democratic society Six. Heaven is high and… Continue reading Six asides on the USA 2020 election
Events threaten to overwhelm my mind. The world stands on the brink of a crisis, and I cannot tell whether the world will drown me, or whether a disordered mind is drowning out the world. Everywhere the crisis is held at a point of tension, and so much seems to hang on how events will… Continue reading Waiting for the crisis to unveil
